… is actually a book. Yes, seriously. There is a book titled Dear White America and the author’s name is Tim Wise.

I reluctantly picked it up at a Barnes and Noble that was going out of business a few years ago. I initially thought that it was another “angry black person” book, yelling at white people (which is probably what you’re thinking this article is right now). But I went ahead and picked it up anyway. My mental shelves were already packed with a wealth of non-fictional information that could inspire me to yell at all the white people I wanted to my own dang self. That particular day I didn’t need anybody else yelling the same thing that I could have been yelling at white folks for.

To my utter disbelief, a young looking white man appeared inside the book’s back cover. I couldn’t even claim him as lightskinned. This man was straight up white. So I checked to make sure that I picked up the right book, but it still said Dear White America. When I decided to catch the book being tricky, I read a few pages. The next thing I remember was that the receipt functioned as my bookmark while I consumed the first 3 chapters sitting in my parked car.

I’ve since followed Wise’s growing influence. From videos of lectures and panel discussions to appearances on CNN, Wise is one of the boldest white men I have ever heard speak the raw truth about the American mindset.

The only way that I can describe Tim Wise is to ask you to imagine that a black nobel laureate rode a time machine back to the 60’s, got filled with the holy ghost in Nashville, Tennessee, then had his brain squeezed into Wise as a toddler – who apparently has been walking around with it ever since. Believe me.

Which brings us now to Donald Trump. If you’re not wealthy and are even thinking about voting for Donald Trump – don’t let that man make a fool out of you.

You obviously have good sense if you can sit through reading this. I’m not trying to be funny this time. You are interested in varying views and I can bet, you’re the type of person that believes in due diligence. It doesn’t hurt that you also A) read beyond a fourth grade level – which our failing public school systems say is a major accomplishment in this country; B) seek out facts TO read which; C) demonstrates that you don’t blindly follow the crowd. It’s the same innate intelligence that’s been giving you pause over and over again about Donald Trump.

I don’t know if you’re tired of establishment politics or if you agree that the economy is a hot mess. I don’t even care if you’re just sick and tired of not getting to see white people everywhere you go. Some things and people can’t be wished away if we tried, and trust me, I’ve tried.

I’m keeping it real with you and hope that you can too. Regardless of how your search has landed you on this page, it doesn’t matter as long as you remember this – Donald Trump and the republican agenda is NOT the answer to improve the quality of your life or that of the “middle class”.

Thanks to the heartless, dog-eat-dog business practices of this country’s largest corporations / employers, THERE IS NO middle class majority anymore. There are the poor, the working poor, the small group of folks who are clinging on to high paying jobs or nest eggs that they earned or inherited, and then of course there are the wealthy.

By the way, the same greed driven cut-throat business tactics mentioned above are exactly what Donald Trump is famous for.

The comfortable job stability of an abundantly thriving middle class has gone bye-bye. From the working poor to the “middle class”, everyone is constantly watching their back, praying that they don’t lose their jobs or nest eggs. Those with the latter are constantly trying to find ways to hold on to their money, which lands many on Wall Street’s front porch of volatility. Both know that they’re one month’s earnings away from a potential financial catastrophe. We watched as major corporate facilities closed down. We read and lived through countless layoffs and furloughs across the country. To add insult to injury we saw in three decades time, hundreds of the nation’s largest corporations pull branches of their operations completely OUT of the country while eagerly GIVING OUR OLD JOBS AWAY to people overseas.

What is not as easy to see is how the wealthy have been playing the majority of Americans like a fiddle. President L.B. Johnson advised his White House Aid, Bill Moyers in 1960,

“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” L.B. Johnson to White House Aid, William Moyers

Tell me this – how in God’s good name are Mexicans (and the silent nod including black folks for that matter) responsible for the fact that 10% of people in this country, WHOM ARE PRIMARILY WHITE, earn an average of 9 times more than the entire remaining 90% do? There aren’t enough illegal immigrants in the world that could pull off such a coup against the United States. And how are illegal immigrants supposed to take over the country when so many are busy doing work that we’re either too lazy or unskilled to do?

There’s only one way to pull this old trick off: To exploit the majority..regardless of color, gender or faith. First tactic: don’t let the majority get along with one another. If they do, they will unite and take over. To do this, the power structure must create theories and practices to wedge a division between them. To effectively do this, there must some form of “reward system” for one group while imposing a “penalty” for another. Sound familiar? It should. Poor whites and slaves were getting along just fine in America back in the day. While slaves were being beaten and killed into destitution, poor whites just had no other choice. For neither could read or write, so both had to do the same manual labor to eat. So, when the wealthy/educated class saw these folks uniting and having babies and parties and rebellions, they knew they had to do something quick. So, they offered poor whites land and a small taste of power in the form of jobs…as “overseers” of slaves. Division complete The rest is history.

(A great lesson about power by former Parliament member, Tony Benn)

If you’re super rich and back Trump, I can almost understand because you probably want to stay super rich and get even richer – regardless if you’re democrat, republican, green, purple, or independent. I would imagine that you think Trump will definitely protect your interests because you have money. However, this fundamental question remains: Why should 90 % of us suffer to make you rich?

I don’t know about you, but I believe Trump could care less if half the planet had to drop dead in order for him to stay rich. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that he would care if half of us got blown off the map by a Putin or North Korean nuclear attack judging by the way he talks.

I digress.

Let’s take a look at the striking comparison between the Great Depression leading into the 1930’s and the Great Recession of the early 2000’s.

1. In 1928 and 2007 the earnings of those who made the highest 10% peaked. Also during those years, this same group paid historically low tax rates.

2. The stock market crashed in 1929 ushering in the Great Depression. The most devastating Recession since the Great Depression tore in with a crash in 2008.

When the largest share of the country’s money stays in the hands of a few, the many can’t afford to buy goods and services. Without enough money, the companies who employ people to provide goods and services can no longer afford to pay them. Wala! The companies cut jobs or worse, go out of business like those which brought lawsuits against Donald Trump.

Don’t just take my word about it. See the hard facts below from the Economic Policy Institute (their text is in blue). You can find my recommendations in the conclusion.

Income Inequality

Income includes the revenue streams from wages, salaries, interest on a savings account, dividends from shares of stock, rent, and profits from selling something for more than you paid for it. Income inequality refers to the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner among a population. In the United States, income inequality, or the gap between the rich and everyone else, has been growing markedly, by every major statistical measure, for some 30 years.

Household and Family Income

Income disparities have become so pronounced that America’s top 10 percent now average nearly nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent. Americans in the top 1 percent tower stunningly higher. They average over 38 times more income than the bottom 90 percent. But that gap pales in comparison to the divide between the nation’s top 0.1 percent and everyone else. Americans at this lofty level are taking in over 184 times the income of the bottom 90 percent.

The top 1 percent of America’s income earners have more than doubled their share of the nation’s income since the middle of the 20th century. American top 1 percent incomes peaked in the late 1920s, right before the onset of the Great Depression.

Inequality in America is growing, even at the top. The nation’s highest 0.1 percent of income-earners have, over recent decades, seen their incomes rise much faster than the rest of the top 1 percent. Incomes in this top 0.1 percent increased 7.5 times between 1973 and 2007, from 0.8 percent to an all-time high of 6 percent. The Great Recession in 2008 did dampen this top 0.1 percent share, but only momentarily. The upward surge of the top 0.1 percent has resumed.

The 1990s saw the annual incomes of the ultra rich explode in size. Between 1992 and 2002, the 400 highest incomes reported to the Internal Revenue Service more than doubled, even after the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000. In the early 21st century, the economic boom driven by the real estate bubble would more than triple top 400 average incomes before the 2008 economic collapse.

High levels of income concentration are pervasive across the country, but there are important differences among states. Connecticut has the highest threshold for entry into the top 1 percent. At least $677,608 in annual income is needed to be a member of this elite group in that state. That’s three times the minimum needed to be among the top 1 percent in bottom-ranking Arkansas. (place cursor on each state for detailed data)

Before the 1980s, lower-income earners owned a far larger portion of total U.S. income than they do today. How much more income would these earners be making today if the United States had the same distribution of income as the nation displayed in 1979? NPR found that Americans would experience income increases of at least $3,000 across all quintile levels, with the highest quintile owed an additional $17,311. The top 1 percent of earners would see a dramatic fall in their income, losing more than just $824,844.

The Congressional Budget Office defines before-tax income as “market income plus government transfers,” or, quite simply, how much income a person makes counting government social assistance. Analysts have a number of ways to define income. But they all tell the same story: The top 1 percent of U.S. earners take home a disproportionate amount of income compared to even the nation’s highest fifth of earners.

Since 1979, the before-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of America’s households have increased more than four times faster than bottom 20 percent incomes.

The Congressional Budget Office defines after-tax income as “before-tax income minus federal taxes.” After taxes, top 1 percent incomes are increasing even faster than before taxes. Before-tax income growth for the top 1 percent has averaged 174.5 percent since 1979. The after-tax increase: 200.2 percent. A progressive tax system should function to narrow income gaps between the affluent and everyone else. Over recent decades, America’s tax system has done no narrowing.

CEO Pay

In the United States today, unions have a much smaller economic presence than they did decades ago. With unions playing a smaller economic role, the gap between worker and CEO pay was nine times larger in 2013 than in 1980.

Wages

Wages in the United States, after taking inflation into account, have been stagnating for more than three decades. Typical American workers and the nation’s lowest-wage workers have seen little or no growth in their real weekly wages.

Between 1979 and 2007, paycheck income of the top 1 percent of U.S. earners exploded by over 256 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent of earners have seen little change in their average income, with just a 16.7 percent increase from 1979 to 2014.

Productivity has increased at a relatively consistent rate since 1948. But the wages of American workers have not, since the 1970s, kept up with this rising productivity. Worker hourly compensation has flat-lined since the mid-1970s, increasing just 15.5 percent from 1979 to 2013, while worker productivity has increased 132.8 percent over the same time period.

Nobody has to be an economist to see what’s right in from of their faces. Greed at the top has sucked a lion’s share of money directly away from the majority and into their own pockets. And the top earners in this country WANT the majority of Americans to remain broke and dumb so that they can continue to rob us blind.

The top 10% of earners are the very ones who are making the corporate decisions to slash thousands of American jobs at a time with a stroke of a pen which represent billions in American wages . They then hire cheaper employees abroad. Despite popular belief, overseas employees are NOT just laborers in the manufacturing sector. They are also giving our jobs to cheaper highly skilled professionals ranging from engineers and scientists to construction workers and MBA’s.

To slap a “STUPID” sticker on the brows of Americans, they promote a big fat lie that of all people – it’s the Mexicans who are taking over. Then, they get all the stupid-sticker folks riled up to VOLUNTARILY pay for a 2,000 mile long x 30 feet high Trump billboard.

If you’re not rich and are looking to improve your quality of life i.e.,. the very possibility of higher wages, lower taxes, and guaranteed healthcare in the event that you get ill, vote for Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, if you want to loseanychance of keeping affordable/ guaranteed healthcare as you continue to work at a job which pays you less than you made 10, 15, and even 20 years ago, while watching the rich pay less in taxes than you do – vote for Donald Trump. That’s just the bottom line. Check their records. Oh, Darnit! I almost forgot…one won’t release them.

Why Universal Health Care Is Essential for a More Equitable Society

Posted: 03/31/2015 6:11 pm EDT Updated: 16 minutes ago

–

The prospects for universal health care in the United States appear unusually bleak these days. Just as the first U.S. state — Vermont — was getting ready to implement a universal, publicly financed health care system, its governor pulled the plug on his support. Years of studies, preparations and proposals, a mountain of supportive data and a clear legal mandate fell by the wayside as soon as Governor Shumlin felt thatthe political stars were no longer aligned. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, even the Affordable Care Act’s approach of making private health insurance more affordable by subsidizing over-priced insurance products is under attack in the Supreme Court.

Why is universal health care, which is commonplace around the world, so hard to achieve in the United States? Why are we unable to overcome a market-based system that leads to a hundred thousand unnecessary deaths each year? Corporate interests in maintaining this system are powerful, as is a culture of competition and consumption that sees health as a personal choice rather than a human right. The odds against universal health care advocates are long: What does it take to turn a market commodity into a public good, and dismantle an entire industry along the way?

For the past few years, as the limitations of the Affordable Care Act were becoming increasingly clear, a mass people’s movement in the small state of Vermont paved the way for universal health care, winning the passage of a 2011 law that mandated the state to financed its health system publicly and equitably and guarantee access to care for all. Yet as the governor’s recent about-face illustrates, the task at hand remains challenging.

It is not a new task, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech, “America’s Chief Moral Dilemma,” reminds us: “It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters; no expenses were involved; no taxes were involved. […] Now we are dealing with issues that will cost the nation something in terms of billions of dollars. […] We are now dealing with issues that will demand a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

Dr. King was envisioning ending poverty and ensuring economic and social rights for all, including people of color who were — and still are — most affected by economic injustice, and he predicted strong resistance from the powers that be. Half a century later, progress toward this vision has been halting at best, and resistance is enduring to this day. The country is currently experiencing the largest concentration of wealth since the 1930s and the biggest income inequality gap since the late 1970s, with inequitable financing of health care directly contributing to this injustice. In the private health insurance system, low-income people pay proportionally more for health care than the wealthy, while receiving lower value insurance plans. One in three people in the U.S. struggle with medical bills, while insurance executives are raking in billion-dollar compensation packets. This inequitable market-based system — with its different and unequal insurance products, different and unequal prices for health services, and different and unequal access to doctors — is both unjust and unsustainable.

Public, tax-based financing of health care would take an important step toward realizing Dr. King’s vision by ensuring both universal access to care and equity in the payment for care. Moreover, it could free up resources for other public services, since universal health care is about sharing costs more equitably, not raising new money. To situate this in Dr. King’s frame, radical health care reform is about economic redistribution through taxes, not about raising extra billions of dollars.

Vermont’s movement for the human right to health care has produced new evidence for this. Governor Shumlin’s own proposal for public financing showed that 9 out of 10 families would see their incomes increase if the state moved to universal health care, with only the wealthiest facing a decrease, while the system overall would generate substantial savings. Yet the governor’s plan tanked because his business tax proposal was inequitable: small businesses were charged the same flat tax rate as large companies, making it a non-starter for the state’s over 75 percent of businesses with fewer than 10 workers.

That is why Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign recently prepared its own equitable financing plan, using the governor’s data as a baseline but adding new revenue designs. At the core of this plan is an innovative, progressive business tax that takes into account company size as well as wage disparity. Tax obligations would be lower for small businesses and for those with low wage gaps between the top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent of wage earners. This would ensure not only that businesses pay based on their ability, but also incentivize them to raise rather than lower wages for the majority of workers. Other revenue sources modeled in the Campaign’s plan include a progressive income tax and a tax on the capital gains, stocks, and financial transactions of the wealthiest 1 percent.

This plan, published by the Vermont Workers’ Center and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, shows that public health care financing at state level is not only financially and economically feasible but essential for paving the way toward a more equitable society. By moving from private, market-based insurance to public financing of universal care, we flip the way we pay for care, so that low- and middle-income people pay a smaller share of their income on health care than the wealthy — the opposite of the current system.

The Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign’s financing plan was delivered to Vermont legislators along with an open letter from over 100 economists from across the country. “As economists,” the letter reads, “we understand that universal, publicly financed health care is not only economically feasible but highly preferable to a fragmented market-based insurance system. Health care is not a service that follows standard market rules; it should be provided as a public good.” The letter concludes with a call for action: “We support publicly and equitably financed health care at federal and state level, and we encourage the government of the state of Vermont to move forward with implementing a public financing plan for the universal health care system envisioned by state law.”

It will take more than 100 economists and a sound financing plan to bring universal health care to the United States. Yet the people’s movement for our right to health, both in the form of Healthcare Is a Human Right campaigns in Vermont, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington, and in vibrant variations in many other states, is continuing the struggle, guided by Dr. King’s reminder that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

New episodes of Speak Out With Tim Wise, available every Tuesday! And if you’d like to help grow the program, and receive extra content (like bonus audio commentaries, signed books and DVDs, and additional interview material that didn’t end up in the weekly episodes) you can do so for as little as $2 a month […]

Sometimes America feels like the movie Groundhog Day: a place where we keep waking up again and again to the same shit, hoping against hope that this time — no really, this time — things will be different. So this time, the videotape of the police officer shooting the unarmed black man (or child, in […]

If, as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, then hoping against hope that this time an officer who shot a black man in cold blood would be held to account, is a type of insanity most profound. Or at the very least evidence of […]

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they see the world and others in it. Those who view the world and its inhabitants as basically good, and who remain relatively hopeful about the better angels of our nature, though occasionally caught off guard by the less salutary aspects of the human […]

Which Dr. King do you honor today? The one who said that white Americans had betrayed their professed commitment to ethicality and equality — and that the country had bounced a check to black folks, which black folks were coming to cash — or the bland and sanitized apostle of color-blindness sold to you by […]